Schulz/Forum

Szkice z pisma „Documents”

2023-03-15T12:17:58+01:00

Polish translation of six essays by Georges Bataille: Architecture, Poussière, Abattoir, Informe, Les écarts de la nature, Bouche, published in the French journal Documents in the 1930s.

Bezformie. Instrukcja obsługi (dwa fragmenty)

2023-03-15T12:20:59+01:00

Polish translation of two chapters from Yve-Alain Bois and Rosalind Krauss’s book Formless. A User’s Guide, New York: Zone Books, 1997.

Dysproporcja w antropomorfizmie

2023-03-15T12:26:52+01:00

Polish translation of one chapter from Georges Didi-Huberman’s book La ressemblance informe. Le Gai Savoir visuel selon Georges Bataille, Paris: Macula, 1995.

Oddanie czci kurzowi. W. G. Sebald i czytanie w tropach

2023-03-15T12:30:50+01:00

Few writers paid as much attention to dust as W. G. Sebald. The author of Austerlitz saw in it „the lowest sign of annihilation” and a “boundary between being and nothingness,” an elegiac way of making the dead present in the text. For Sebald, all the ways of reading the past were “reading (in) dust,” making this particular way close to prophesying. The author of the essay follows Sebald’s opinion, tracing various forms and manifestations of the “prophetic epistemological paradigm.” Reading the irregular, reading „what has never been written,” has also its political aspect of (re)thinking the past from the remains of destruction. This is how dust becomes critical and subversive matter.

Panoptikum Heinricha Trabera w Drohobyczu w 1913 roku

2023-03-15T13:00:45+01:00

The article describes the arrival of Heinrich Traber’s Panopticum in Drogobych in the spring of 1913. The author attempts to reconstruct this event relying on the information found in the preserved catalog (Guide to the Heinrich Traber’s Anatomical Museum and Panopticum). An additional context mentioned in the essay is work practice of Traber, especially years 1898-1904, when he was running the „Kosmos” Panopticum in Prague where he arranged popular freaks shows. Probably after he had to close down his business, he set out on a tour with his collection, resigning from the display of „human peculiarities.” The main question is what Schulz could see in Traber’s traveling museum, if he had seen it at all. Basing on the catalog, we know that in the museum there were anatomical preparations and wax figures. It is interesting that in one of Schulz’s short stories, “The Spring,” there is a wax figures cabinet and two surnames of historical figures that might have been taken from Traber’s exhibition: Alfred Dreyfus and Luigi Luccheni (they are also mentioned in the guide). On the other hand, there is no reason to insist that Schulz was inspired by Traber’s panopticum when he was writing his story, because the tradition of wax figures cabinet was commonly known in his times and in the art and literature of modernism the motifs of puppet, wax figure, and marionette were very popular.

Przewodnik po Panoptikum i Muzeum Anatomicznym Heinricha Trabera

2023-03-15T13:15:38+01:00

Polish translation of the Heinrich Traber’s preface and the first part of Führer durch Traber’s Panoptikum und Anatomisches Museum, Verlag von Heinrich Traber, Druck von Wilhelm Neuman, Pirmasens [n.d.].

Dotknięcie Paryża

2023-03-15T11:22:52+01:00

Schulz never made it to „Paris” even though in the summer of 1938 he spent in the city more than three weeks, which is confirmed by his travel documents and hotel bills. Where was he then between July 31 and August 26 that year, if not in Paris? Indeed right there. At first he was allowed to enter the Paris for tourists. This is always the best way to learn something about any place. However, Schulz managed to reach beyond the recommendations of the tourist guide and get in touch with the artists who lived and worked in “another” Paris – the city of artists who preferred to settle down in the district of Montparnasse. He met with Lille, Brzękowski, probably also Weingart, talked to the marchand Rotgé, came upon Aronson, Basler, Szalit, perhaps also Marcoussis. That was it as regards the documented Paris agenda of the author of Sanatorium under the Sign of an Hourglass, highly appreciated in Poland. Not too much for 27 days spent in the world capital shortly before it fell. Let’s ask whom Schulz could have met in Paris at that time and whom he should have met. In Paris, the city of new artistic and philosophical ideas, in the 1930s lived many artists and thinkers who seemed close enough to him. He had a lot in common with Bataille who published in the journal Documents, which he edited, a note titled Informe while in the “Treatise on Tailor Dummies” Jacob was lecturing to Polda and Pauline about matter. Yet most likely Schulz never heard about Bataille even though they might have passed each other in the corridor of some Paris brothel, as well as about Artaud who in the late thirties published his Manifesto of the Theater of Cruelty. Schulz was in Paris but Paris did not notice him. It was not so much that he did not speak French but, as his good friend Chasin said, he lacked the selbstbewußt, self-reliance, or perhaps assertiveness that, according to Barbara Skarga, “overcomes everything, horrible as it is.” Schulz was not a conqueror and he should not have tried to conquer the world capital. It would have been much better, if, struggling for his fame, he had sent to the frontline not himself (in person), but his works. Unfortunately, in 1938 they were still locked up in the Polish language.

Rzeźba czy ruina? O Schulzu Foera

2023-03-15T12:01:11+01:00

The essay is an attempt to read The Tree of Codes by Jonathan Safran Foer in linear and nonlinear modes. The author analyzes Foer’s text made of „The Street of Crocodiles” by Bruno Schulz and compares the literary experiment of the American writer with the selected phenomena in contemporary culture, repeating the question about the status of Foer’s book’s, both a ruin and a monument.

O zjadaniu Innych

2023-03-15T12:09:47+01:00

Anthropophagy returns in the works of the inter-war avant-gardes as an important and overdetermined metaphor which describes, e.g., the attitudes to tradition and otherness. The appropriation and devouring of the Other becomes not only a description of certain artistic and ethnographic practices, but perhaps also or even in the first place a hidden paradigm of our culture. The frame within which anthropophagic metaphors appeared at that time was the critique of capitalism and colonialism. The author considers that anthropophagic phantasy and its various – anthropological, literary, and political – contexts. His object of interest is the journal Documents (particularly photos by Jacques-Andre Boiffard and a text by Georges Bataille), Roger Caillois’s essay on the praying mantis, the key text of the Brazilian avant-garde, Anthropophagic Manifesto by Oswald de Andrade, and “The Street of Crocodiles” by Bruno Schulz.

Schulz w Paryżu

2023-03-15T12:46:10+01:00

The text includes a possibly complete reconstruction of 27 days spent by Schulz in Paris in 1938. The reconstruction provides the basis of a theoretical commentary which compares the advantages and traps of narrativized biographical discourses on Schulz with the order of the calendar. All that is known about Schulz in Paris has been found in about a dozen documents and several dozens of references in his correspondence, which is not too bad for a biography of a “writer without archive.” The documentation of other episodes of his life is much scarcer. We know when and where he stayed in Paris, sometimes even his hotel room number. However, of the 27 days spent by Schulz in Paris only about one third can be reconstructed in fragments. All the rest remains nebulous and impenetrable. Schulz often disappears into thin air and in fact we do not know what he was doing all days long. He neither talked nor wrote about it much. The opinions and remarks which he formulated, e.g., that Paris is a „riotous Babylon,” were quickly picked up by his exegetes and reconstructors of his biography. The surviving documents set boundaries which – while the reconstruction of episodes is still at stake – can be crossed only by conjectures and speculation. There is nothing wrong in these risky procedures. They are not bad as such, but those who move too far from the documents letter can be easily led astray. Not that everything is legitimate – in the world without the god of biography some rules are still valid. Conjectures and speculation must not reach beyond the „material truth.”

Bruno Schulz i informe. Intermedialna nieaktualność

2023-03-15T11:32:37+01:00

The starting point of this paper was a research presentation at an academic conference about Schulz’s “antimodern modernism,” organized by Marek Tomaszewski, Małgorzata Smorąg-Goldberg, and Paweł Rodak in Paris on June 9th, 2017. At the crossroads of literature and art history, the author aims at showing how formlessness, as defined in 1929 by Georges Bataille, haunts Bruno Schulz’ fiction (in Polish “bezkształtność” or “bezformie”). His literary works have already been associated with various trends of the Central European modernism, but it should also be linked to the early development of the Informal Arts in this area, before it revolutionized post-war painting. Given Schulz’s taste for old printed books, and the nature of his own drawings and engravings (in the cliché-verre or glass print technique), a survey of all the traces of the idea of formlessness in his literary works leads to a conclusion that there is an anachronism between texts and images. Such a gap between universal form dissolution in fiction and its static graphic counterpart remains to be interpreted: how can Schulz’s works both look back to the nostalgic pre-war realities and anticipate post-war artistic, if not philosophical, tendencies?

Płeć i słowa. Różnicowanie Schulza

2023-03-15T11:42:13+01:00

In an interesting and in some ways innovative essay, “Two Romantic Worlds. On Bruno Schulz and Witold Gombrowicz” [Dwa światy romantyczne. O Brunonie Schulzu i Witoldzie Gombrowiczu], published in 1938 in Skamander, Henryk Vogler called Schulz „the most genuine – perhaps even the only – representative of femininity in our literature.” This intuitive claim certainly deserves to be remembered not only because Vogler as the only critic of the inter-war period and one of very few at that time made an attempt to turn gender into an aesthetic category applicable to Schulz’s fiction, but also because he recognized its “femininity” as a value. Such an approach was by no means obvious. Along with the development of feminist movements and the crisis of masculinity which surfaced in literature and art after the Great War, opposite trends were still present in the inter-war decades. They were trying not only to conserve, but to strengthen the hegemonic fascist model of masculinity also in Poland of the 1930s. If, however, Schulz’s fiction has some features of the feminine writing – if such comparison can shed some light on his stories – he came close not so much to the styles which were radically opposite, i.e. dependent on the masculine idiom, but to those which worked through “delicate deviations” as if from the inside, destabilizing and opening it to new contexts. In this case, “delicate” is
not a synonym of „insignificant,” but points at hardly comprehensible, ambiguous rhythms of the écriture feminine. Asking questions about the ties which connect gender and modes of expression, we keep moving along delicate boundaries separating existence, aesthetics, ethics, and politics. This, suggests Elaine Showalter, „makes us obliged to answer with equal delicacy and precision.” I believe that in the case of Schulz instead of strong oppositions one should rather emphasize movement – a continuous, endless process of differentiating instead of a polar opposition of the masculine and feminine.

Obraz w obrazie i rama. Schulz wobec tradycji

2023-03-15T11:47:42+01:00

This article aims to reevaluate Schulz’s early drawings from 1919 to 1921, rarely included in scholarship on Schulz’s artwork, by focusing on the motifs of “picture within a picture,” imitation of historical paintings, and the frame of the image. Previous scholarship on Schulz’s artwork mainly discussed the specific theme of men’s worship of women in the 1920s cliché-verre series The Book of Idolatry and regarded Schulz’s seemingly realistic renderings as “anachronistic” compared to twentieth-century modernist art. Here, I will first focus on Schulz’s adaptation of the style of historical paintings into his so-called “masochistic motifs” of men supplicating themselves to women. By creating a gap between the style and the content expectations of the viewer familiar with the conventions of European paintings, Schulz’s early drawings question the custom or conventional understanding of paintings created for acceptance and success in the European Art Academy system. Second, I invoke Derrida’s interpretation of the concept of “parergon” in The Truth in Painting (1978) to reconsider the motifs of frame and “picture within a picture,” omnipresent in Schulz’s early drawings. Through these means, I explore Schulz’s perception and attitude regarding medium specifics of paintings as Clement Greenberg argued regarding modernist paintings. Thus, I discuss his early drawings as self-referential and radically modernist works.

Schulz w Roju

2023-03-15T12:37:15+01:00

After writing Cinnamon Shops, Bruno Schulz faced the need to find a publisher. We know that thanks to the protection of Zofia Nałkowska, he managed to publish his debut book with the Rój publishing house located in Warsaw. However, before it happened, he had been unsuccessfully looking for a publisher willing to take the risk of publishing a sophisticated book by an unknown author. To examine this problem, the author of the article investigates the condition of the Polish book market in the 1930s, examining surviving documentation and memories. He also analyzes what Schulz expected from his publisher and the terms under which his book was released. Finally, he attempts to calculate the benefits and losses that Schulz incurred by publishing the book with the Rój publishing house.

Sygnatury tekstowe. Wokół niemieckojęzycznych opowiadań Brunona Schulza

2023-03-15T12:41:34+01:00

The author of the article searches for an answer to the question whether the stories might have been written by Bruno Schulz from Drogobych, the one who wrote The Cinnamon Shops. Given that the query has not yet been concluded beyond doubt, she tries to find alternative methods of analyzing these texts. She assumes that young Schulz’s style pattern should not be established by analyzing only his mature texts. Schulz wrote many short stories that could not be found, therefore, the question of his literary identity is still relevant. An account of his literary style can be found in the analysis carried out in the 1970s by Piotr Wróblewski. It allows for finding the most common features that distinguish Schulz from other writers. The distinction is crucial for either confirmation or rejection of authorship. The author conducts an experiment to evaluate the stylistic features in German stories and the result is surprising. In reference to The Cinnamon Shops as well as Schulz’s other well-known other works and his early story “Undula,” his authorship proves certain. However, in the German stories examination yields slightly more than half of the positive responses. The author assumes that in each text there are traces of someone’s individual, unique style, calling them metaphorically “text signatures,” the “fingerprints” of the text. In her research, she also uses methods such as forensic linguistics and stylometry. The author deals with the stereotype of Schulz’s literary debut facilitated by the support of Zofia Nałkowska. In the article, she tries to reconstruct Schulz’s first literary steps and wonders what he might have written between the publication of ”Undula” and “The Birds” (and later The Cinnamon Shops), and whether he included his first literary samples in letters to his friends or during the Kalleia’s meetings in Drogobych. The author lists his lost works and ends the article with the question of Schulz’s identity.

Między radykalnym od-graniczeniem a krytycznym dystansem. Dekonstrukcyjne adaptacje mitu w prozie Brunona Schulza

2023-03-15T11:54:49+01:00

Myth forms the central interpretive category for Bruno Schulz’s fiction. The approaches range from ideological appropriations through the Polish messianism, biographical reductions or theological exegeses. In the present article, on the other hand, connections are made to Ernst Cassirer’s Philosophy of Symbolic Forms to show how Schulz adopts in his narratives resounding theorems of modern myth reception. It is argued that the transfer of the concept of myth to the subjective world of his own childhood is linked to questioning of rational models of reality. At the same time, this is differentiated from the assumption that Schulz uses myth in an irrationally transfiguring way: the power of myth is broken by the fact that he consistently relativizes his mythologizing principle and in this way presents himself as a dubious agent of rationalization. This leads to a claim that his reference to myth is not an affirmative adoption of modern mythologization, but it turns out to be a deconstructive play with traditional aesthetic forms, which is systematically geared towards the outsourcing of his fiction from normative categories and, at the same time, reflects the potential danger of mythologization that promises salvation.

Widmo Danii

2023-03-15T12:50:08+01:00

Polish translation of one chapter from Dominique Hérody’s book À Paris, égaré: Bruno Schulz, août 1938, Paris: PhB éditions, 2019.

Literacka fantazja na temat Schulza w Paryżu

2023-03-15T12:53:25+01:00

In 2019, an obscure Paris press PhB éditions published a small (86 pages) book titled À Paris, égaré. Bruno Schulz, août 1938. The author is Dominique Hérody, known before mainly as a draughtsman and author of comic books, as well as founder of the journal Le Paresseux and designer of some books. Fascinated with Schulz’s fiction or perhaps even more with his graphic works, Hérody, referring to scarce and enigmatic information about the Paris visit of the author of Cinnamon Shops – decided to reconstruct that episode in his life, supplementing his knowledge drawn from the French and English language sources with his own conjectures and pure phantasy.

Repliki i fikcje

2023-03-15T12:57:21+01:00

A fragment of a narratvized essay on the life and work of Bruno Schulz. An impression on the writer’s visit to the capital of France in August 1938.